Timing

If time is a river, I’ve been swimming upstream all day.

I scheduled an appointment today, and when I got there it turns out I needed a document I won’t have for another week. Then I was an hour late to a video conference because I apparently don’t understand how British Daylight Savings Time works.

If I had known I would need the document, I wouldn’t have gone to the appointment. If I hadn’t gone to the appointment, I would have seen the notification that the video conference had started and been able to jump right on. And if I had known the video conference was actually starting an hour earlier, I would have been able to do a thing for my daughter that I had told her I wouldn’t be able to do because of the video conference.

Timing is everything, as they say.

None of these things were critical, and they all resolved fine. A rescheduled appointment is only the most minor of inconveniences. The host of the video conference was understanding and had no problem reviewing some information with me, and we’re meeting again in a week. My daughter is of course perfectly capable of waiting for this small favor, it just meant being a little more patient. So nothing burned down or exploded and nobody died.

But it was such a reminder of how important those small details are, and how quickly they can cascade when you miss even one.